So that obviously went almost as well as could have been expected. Trash was very smooth and at no point during that fight did it feel like we weren't going to get the win - our healing/mitigations and DPS was clearly up to the task and the only issue was executing the platform swapping strategy correctly. This is an easily farm-able fight, we really should be able to beat this quite easily now imo. Now, I don't know how much of it was because we had 2x cappies, and I'm not sure that we'll always have 2x cappies, but yeah, really good job here. It wasn't nearly as scary as I had feared lol.

So gj - that was a server second clear!

The only negative for the night was, again, pressing forward at the end of the night to do something we weren't really prepared for. We've done it before and it never works out well, we should have just called it a night after poison. Ah well, live and learn .

Ivar

Trash in OD is basically a test of CC abilities, and it's here that our group shines. A lot of groups have issues with that 2nd Ivar pull (as we showed on the first night!) but when we actually went in there prepared and ready to go, it was super easy.

The boss fight though? It was a real wakeup call, and felt like the exact opposite of the Poison fight. Once we sorted out our issues on the champions, which will be better and better in the future now that we've seen them, the boss itself proved to be exactly as scary as I had feared. A few weeks ago I started putting the following comment, in teal, in the signup thread to put people on notice as to what we were going to need to beat Ivar:

Especially moving into the Ivar fight, shadow and tactical mitigation will be absolutely crucial to beating the raid. Please ensure that you have the relevant virtues (Tolerance, Mercy*, Fidelity, Honour) to at least rank 7 and preferably rank 9 and also Charm of Defence which you can barter from the Haunted Inn (or another tactical defence pocket) will probably be a mandatory piece of gear for Ivar. A tactical defence scroll for your class item, from the instances in Dolven View, is probably a good idea too. Getting 3 pieces of purple Lothlorien or Mirkwood gear for a shadow mitigation bonus will also be very strongly recommended - these sets take about 50 Lothlorien or Dol Gudur medallions to get in total.

I just want to emphasise every one of those points. The above factors are absolutely, utterly, necessary to be able to even think about surviving the DPS bombs that Ivar throws out.

But even doing that is not just going to get us an automatic win. It's clearly a tough fight that's going to stress all of our DPS, healing and tanking skills. Finding the right balance of DPS vs threat, and healing vs length of fight (ie how much DPS to do and when) is going to take quite a lot of practice to beat. It's a tough fight, Ivar does far more damage than our healers can keep up with for any length of time, and that's cool, I like a challenge. But to be able to even start to learn that, we need to make sure we all have as much tactical and shadow mitigation as possible to give us a chance.

Ivar showed us the next 'step' we need to take our games to. I did notice some people hadn't switched out pockets and some didn't even have the moria armor, these little things will get us across the line when fixed. We did manage to hold on to just before checkpoint 2 (~240k) at one stage, so it's not entirely out of our grasp as after that DPS increases mid-150s all the big heals drop and 60-80k IHW-LS kicks in, so it's all mapped out, it's just practice and preparation now. To be honest i'm happy to keep going into these wings were we have to be humbled and wipe a bit because it means we've found our next challenge, and it's not same old same old, more of this!

Even though we didn't get it there was obvious improvement in the execution across the night, initially we couldn't handle the warg and troll damage output and kept losing one or both of the tanks, by the end the champions weren't as a big an issue, the DPS was more controlled and big 'old maturz-olog wasn't getting free morale every time his corruption kicked in. So it's not all bad, learned alot!

Just wanting clarification on virtues: I prefer to slot innocence as a melee over honour (~100 difference in shadow defence, but +1000 melee defence) so i normally run (valour, innocence, fidelity, tolerance, mercy). I'd assume this would be okay?

Also asides from just focusing on ivar (as we probably won't be rolling locks like that this week) should we start moving into a basic strategy for wound t2c and maybe a peek at fear t2?

EDIT: people have also expressed alot of interest in doing BG on off-raid nights rather than DN for a bit. and some of the new sign-ups are quite keen for watcher!

Check this out btw, the morale thresholds on ivar are alot clearer for this RK due to %ges, so you can see what is happening when. They've elected to go 3 healers with the rk switching to DPS at 25%. (could be a valid strat, 2 on dedicated aoe healing, with another focus healing tank(s)).

I watched that video and the Resistance one again more closely and it appears to me that the 2nd incoming healing debuff is castable? (that or there's only one debuff that's 100%). Either way the damage is still insane! 3 healers may be the way to go initially much like we did in poison.

yeah, the feeling among the officers is that we probably won't be doing ANY T1 wings again, unless we meet insurmountable progression roadblocks. While that does mean that we'll be stepping away from Ivar while we tackle Fear T2, many of the lessons from last night re the importance of building for tactical defence are equally important in the Fear T2 fight. Re Wound T2c - we might tweak the strat a bit, but doubt we'll focus on it because it really is a long way away based on our last couple of shots in there. I'd rather get some completely new wings under our belts (ie fear/ivar and ultimately gorth).

Good call re innocence/honour although, hmmm, which is going to be better - honour or valour? +300 morale great I agree, but it'd be good to look over your logs and see what sort of shadow damage totals you were taking from Ivar to see whether the extra couple of % shadow mitigation outweighs the Morale. I doubt we'll be spending too much time on max morale during that fight .

definitely a possibility re 3 healers, with a swing RK. Given our current comp, that'd probably involve Talas main tanking it and you going on Marsi - although we could consider using Nyssiel too. I'd like to have at least one more attempt with the current makeup before switching up tho, we really only had two shots and were somewhat sabotaged by stuns and just the fact that it was our first time coping with all that damage.